Wisconsin native, conservative critic of everything.
"Once abolish the God, and the government becomes the God." ---G K Chesterton
"The only objective of Liberty is Life" --G K Chesterton
"Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions" --G K Chesterton
"A man can never have too much red wine, too many books, or too much ammunition." -- Rudyard Kipling

Saturday, September 14, 2013

What Evil Is

One of the most significant intellectual breakthroughs of
Augustine's life was the insight that evil is not something substantial,
but rather a type of non-being, a lack of some perfection that ought to
be present. Thus, a cancer is evil in the measure that it compromises
the proper functioning of a bodily organ, and a sin is evil in the
measure that it represents a distortion or twisting of a rightly
functioning will. Accordingly, evil does not stand over and against the
good as a kind of co-equal metaphysical force, as the Manichees would
have it. Rather, it is invariably parasitic upon the good, existing
only as a sort of shadow.

J.R.R. Tolkien gave visual expression to this Augustinian notion in his portrayal of the Nazgul in The Lord of the Rings.
Those terrible and terrifying threats, flying through the air on
fearsome beasts, are revealed, once their capes and hoods are pulled
away, to be precisely nothing, emptiness. And this is exactly why, to
return to Arendt's description, evil can never be radical. It can never
sink down into the roots of being; it can never stand on its own; it has
no integrity, no real depth or substance. To be sure, it can be extreme
and it can, as Arendt's image suggests, spread far and wide, doing
enormous damage. But it can never truly be. And this is why, when it
shows up in raw form, it looks, not like Goethe's Mephistopheles or
Milton's Satan, but rather like a little twerp in a glass box.

Don't be surprised that Tolkien knew that. Don't be surprised that Arendt knew that. Instead, remember it. It will serve you well.